-Â­ From "Cherish your doubts," in "Gates of Prayer," used
in Jewish services.

Glenn Baeske / The Huntsville TimesJewish women speak out about conditions for Palestinians in a book edited by Osie Adelfang, center. Two of her children Anna, age 10, right, and Ellie, age 6, left, look over her shoulder.

HUNTSVILLE, AL -- When Osie Gabriel Adelfang celebrates Passover in her Huntsville home beginning
March 30, she will emphasize, as do most Jews, how the feast celebrates the
liberation of oppressed people.

But the oppressed people her own children will learn about
will include not only the ancient Israelite slaves in Egypt and modern genocide
victims in Darfur, but also Palestinians squeezed into shrinking spaces of land
and liberty in Israel, the place where Adelfang was born.

Equating modern oppression of Palestinians with the story of
Passover is an imaginative leap many Jews and friends of Israel cannot
make, Adelfang says.

"Part of why this subject is so hard to talk about is
because Jews are so used to seeing themselves as the victim," Adelfang said
last week, referring to historic attacks on Jews such as the Inquisition and
the Holocaust.

"Most Israelis will just say 'We're in a terrible mess,' but
no one ever goes into detail," Adelfang said.

Heroic cousin

Adelfang and the other writers go into detail. The essays
and poems tell of living in, working in, loving the land and protesting the
current policies in and around Israel.

The fact that the collection, being published this month by
Whole World Press, is appearing first in the United States is important,
Adelfang says. She's seen slightly more open discussion and criticism of
Israeli policies in Israel
than in the U.S.

"The Palestinians are suffering, but no one wants to talk
about it because they feel disloyal. Somehow, if someone Jewish says anything
against Israel,
you're labeled as a self-hating anti-Semite," Adelfang said.

Adelfang is neither.

Raised by secular Jews whose parents had settled in Israel prior to World War II, Adelfang is proud
of her Jewish ancestry and loved spending summers in Israel
with her cousins after her family moved to New York.

When her draft letter arrived when she was 17, she was ready
to pack her bags to go serve her term in the Israel Defense Forces. Her parents
nixed that plan. They wanted her in college.

But Adelfang stayed in touch with an Israeli cousin she
thought of as her hero: Haim Weiss, who became a tank commander in the IDF. She
thought Haim was fighting for justice for Israel.

Distracted as an adult by her own life, including the death
of her second child shortly after birth, Adelfang was startled in the spring of
2002 to receive a request from Weiss to help translate a letter. Haim had
joined other IDF soldiers in publishing "The Combatants' Letter," which told
why they refused to serve in the occupied territories.

The "Combatants' Letter" outlines the reasons why these
Israeli patriots were refusing to serve beyond the borders established by the
1967 war. It details how they see the actions of the IDF in the occupied
Palestinian territories as antithetical to their personal beliefs and values as
Jews and Israelis. Haim asked Adelfang to translate a letter to his commanding
officer about that letter to be published in The Guardian of London.

Although Adelfang, a writer with a master's in creative
writing, is fluent in Hebrew, she struggled with the translation. She lived
with the words for weeks as she made sure she could capture both tone and
temper of the carefully worded manifesto.

The letter and long conversations with her cousin opened her
eyes to what she realized she had spent her life ignoring: The desperate reality
of Palestinians who live in and around the country she loves, and the way the
occupation is making Israeli soldiers into monsters.

Haim's heroism called Adelfang out of her own grief. Her
cousin had put his career and reputation on the line to write the letter and
join the organization Courage to Refuse with those other army veterans. What
was she going to do?

Finding a dream

Adelfang read about the situation. She raised money for
Palestinian relief causes. She talked to friends.

Meanwhile, she was able to have a third baby, who lived. She
and her husband adopted a son from Russia. She began homeschooling
their children.

Then, in 2008, at a homeschooling conference, she wandered
into a seminar on helping children realize their dreams.

"I'll never forget it," Adelfang said. "The presenter,
Daniel Armstrong, said, 'The way to show your kids how to dream is by making
your dreams come true.'"

Later, Adelfang took a long walk, considering which of her
own dreams she had shelved because it was too impractical or too big or too
impossible. She'd always wanted to write a book. Should she do a book? Perhaps
something about navigating an international adoption?

"But then I heard my Dad's voice - we used to walk together
when he was alive - I heard his voice clearly in my head: 'The adoption book
can wait. You have to write about peace in the Middle East.'"

Adelfang's eyes, a startling desert-green, get wide as she
describes that moment of comprehension when her own happy childhood in Jerusalem and her recent
realization of the cost of the occupation came home to her.

"I realized, finally, this is something I can do."

Forsaking 'God of Force'

Adelfang put her experience as a magazine editor to work.
She called for submissions and beginning to consider what sort of book could
help make peace in a vexed land.

Facts, she realized, won't do it. There are too many facts -
and deliberate miss-facts - flying around as it is. No, the only thing that
will work, she decided, are stories. Simple stories, little pieces of the
larger truth with human faces on them, little windows into the lives of people
caught up in the interlocked fates of Israel
and Palestine.

Submissions came in from nationally and internationally
recognized activists, including Anna Baltzer, a former Fulbright Scholar who
has lectured in Huntsville;
filmmaker Jen Marlowe, who filmed "Darfur Diaries;" and Alice Rothchild,
co-founder of American Jews for a Just Peace.

The stories, like a collage of lives, began to take shape:
Stories of painting a barrier wall in West Bank
as a way to turn apartheid into art. Stories of great kindness; of Hedy
Epstein, 85, a Holocaust survivor, active in Women in Black and with Free Gaza
Movement; of a Jewish woman's search for the childhood home of her New York friend, a home
from which his Palestinian family had been forced after the 1967 war.
Adelfang's own essay tells of her summers in Israel and how she came to see her
cousin's heroism in refusing to serve in the IDF any longer.

American peace activist Cindy Sheehan wrote the
introduction. Respected Israeli journalist Amira Hass agreed to do the forward.

The book also contains two poems, including "Good Germans"
by Emma Rosenthal. A line in the poem quotes an Israeli settler, "Killing them
is killing me" - an apt summary of how the occupation drains both wealth and
morality from the modern state of Israel.

At the end, none of the essayists come to any five-point
action plans or manifestos. The goal of the book, Adelfang said, is to start a
conversation about the people behind the wall and to consider what's going on.
To, as the prayer from which she took the book's title suggests, realize that
"doubt is the handmaiden of truth."

At the very least, Adelfang hopes, the essays will get
people to realize the current policies are not working. Peace activist Starhawk
notes her essay, "The God of Force is failing, but there are others to call
upon."

"Tragedy is tragedy," Adelfang said. "We need to consider
each other as human beings, not as enemies. I think most people in the world
want peace. I guess that's the hope, the faith, that drives this book."